For IT, 2021 will be all about polishing and refining the strategies rapidly put in place to facilitate the employee exodus from the campus to the home. Remote workforces, once the exception, have become the new status quo. As the dust settles, many enterprises may find this temporary solution is now a permanent expectation.
So we’re nearing the end of 2020, and luckily the shock and awe of the pandemic has largely worn off as employees have adjusted to the work from home life. On the enterprise side, patchwork, short-term solutions that were thrown together when shelter-in-place mandates were first instituted are being switched out for long-term options that will better accommodate the remote workforce, many of whom may choose to continue to work remotely even after the pandemic is over.
Each Friday you can expect to see a new "Industry Info to Know" blog post from WEI consisting of a roundup of articles from industry experts, analysts, and our partners that we find insightful and helpful. We will also include links to industry news that you need to know about, news that will impact your business so you can plan ahead for it. We all need to help each other right now, we're all in IT together.
In part of one this two-part blog series, we discussed the recent study by Forrester Research outlining the economic impact of Macs in the enterprise. The study showed that while the initial purchase price of a Mac is $500 more than a comparable PC, its true cost is actually $50.25 less over a 3-year product cycle once hardware and software costs are accounted for. The disparity in costs is even more pronounced once supporting costs such as provisioning, deployment, help desk tickets and energy are factored in. Forrester found the resulting cost savings to be $678.56. In the end, TCO matters far more than the initial price tag.
Data center architectures have continually evolved to meet the needs of mobile, social, big data, and cloud applications--and enterprise security solutions have evolved as well to support the new security needs of these applications in distributed data centers.
With an increasing number of enterprises investing in digital transformation and the software defined data center (SDDC), IT leaders are getting accustomed to managing overwhelming large volumes of data and business applications. With this shift, network security is proving to be a foundational (and required) layer when it comes to building the data center needed to drive business of today.
WEI is aware of the new vulnerabilities related to Intel and other CPUs which could potentially allow an attacker to gather privileged information from CPU cache and system memory, putting enterprise security at risk. The vulnerabilities are code named “Meltdown” and “Spectre." The “Meltdown” issue is reported to only affect Intel CPUs while “Spectre” is reported to affect Intel, AMD, and ARM. The impact of these vulnerabilities could extend back to CPUs from as early as 1995 (in the case of Intel).
Regardless of organizational size or industry, every company faces significant data and network security concerns today. Those concerns increase substantially for organizations that deal with protected or sensitive information in any way, including health, financial, or even basic customer data. The past decade has seen a growing number of both internal and external data security breaches in industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, entertainment, banking, and military contracting, and threats are unlikely to subside anytime soon. Organizations who act now to counter the threats of the future are the ones who have the best chance at protecting customers, employees, and brand reputations.
There’s a new technology threat your organization should be cautious of in 2017 – it’s called whaling. Just like the practice of hunting a whale, cyber criminals use this technique to reel in a big catch by targeting top decision-making executives at enterprise organizations—and it works. If that doesn’t sound scary enough, many companies have experienced this threat in a very real way. Read on for a look into some high-profile, real-life whaling cases and their consequences.
There’s a lot of talk about SDN solutions today such as Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure. In fact, Cisco ACI is the industry’s most comprehensive software defined networking (SDN) architecture to date. By integrating ACI into IT operations, IT now has the ability to align IT services with business objectives and policy requirements. [click to tweet] Achieving this organizational transformation can be a game changer for most any organization, allowing them to streamline their services at large and gain greater efficiencies and profit margins. Instead of serving its traditional role as a cost bucket, IT can become a leader, introducing and initiating value added projects that recognizably add to the profitability and success of the business.
